Amazon (AMZN) has an answer for investors questioning its massive spending on artificial intelligence: Demand for its cloud business is surging.
The company’s cloud backlog — future business Amazon has already contracted but has not yet turned into revenue — jumped to $364 billion in the first quarter, CEO Andy Jassy said on the company’s earnings call.
And that figure doesn’t include Amazon’s recently announced Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) deal for more than $100 billion.
The increase is a sharp jump from the $244 billion in cloud backlog Amazon disclosed at the end of the fourth quarter. Back then, investors were still digesting the company’s roughly $200 billion capital spending plan for 2026.
The backlog is the key counterpoint to the cash-flow pressure that showed up in Amazon’s first quarter results. The company is spending heavily on data centers, chips, servers, and other infrastructure before it can collect the revenue from that capacity.
Jassy made that timing gap explicit on the earnings call, saying AWS has to lay out cash for “land, power, buildings, chips, servers, and networking gear” before it can monetize that spending. “Typically six to 24 months before we start [billing] customers,” he said.
But he also pushed back on the idea that Amazon is building without visibility.
Jassy said there is “reasonable breadth” in the backlog — reported by Amazon as “remaining performance obligations” — and that it is “not just one customer or two customers.”
That makes backlog the number to watch after Amazon’s earnings. If those contracts turn into revenue fast enough, the AI spending boom looks like a growth investment.
Amazon’s fresh record closing high on Thursday suggests investors are giving the company room to prove it.
Jared Blikre is the global markets and data editor for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @SPYJared or email him at jaredblikre@yahooinc.com.
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